Disability and Latin American Cultural Studies: A Critique of Corporeal Difference, Identity and Social Exclusion

Abstract

This essay explores the shift from a social model to social-constructivist model in the burgeoning field of disability studies within Latin American cultural studies. It does so by examining Latin American literature and culture beginning in the 1980s and its increasing focus on theories of exclusion within the particular framework of human rights. The first part of this essay centers on the experience of the disabled body, and corporeal difference more broadly, in Susan Antebi’'s Carnal Inscriptions (2009), the first text in Latin American cultural studies dedicated solely to disability. The second part of this essay looks at Argentina’'s Disability Rights Network (REDI, Red por los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad), which defines disability primarily through disabled people's exclusion from the workforce. Both of these conversations, I argue, ultimately fold into each other by reconceptualizing disability as an issue of human rights exclusion, and not necessarily one of class exploitation.  In this way, this essay suggests that this focus on the human rights model obfuscates a clearer reading of the intersection between disability and exploitation in Latin America. The last part of the essay points to some potential directions the field might take with respect to Latin America in order to overcome the limitations of this human rights model, limitations that include not only the increasing emphasis on the social construction of disability but also the widespread disregard for challenging a system that produces economic exploitation for disabled and able-bodied alike.